A true partnership for creative solutions

About the customer

DELTA Fiber is one of the fastest-growing fiber optic companies in the Netherlands.
The DELTA Fiber network reaches around 1.7 million households and businesses. The company’s ambition is to make the fastest internet accessible to as many households and businesses in the Netherlands as possible. Under the DELTA and Caiway brands, the company supplies internet with gigabit speeds of up to 8 Gbps, interactive TV, and fixed and mobile telephony to both consumers and businesses. DELTA Fiber employs more than 1,200 people.

When the solution doesn’t exist

The leading Dutch telecommunications company, DELTA Fiber, specializes in providing high-speed internet, television, and telephone services in the country. It focuses on deploying fiber-optic infrastructure across various, sometimes remote, regions of the Netherlands. As the leading fiber expert, it is committed to investing in the latest technology to enhance service quality and reliability. This includes projects that affect the company’s relationships with partners and vendors. One such project came to life when wholesale vendors, who rely on DELTA Fiber’s infrastructure to offer their services, needed to raise tickets.

Relying on ServiceNow to create tickets, see the status, and follow the developments seemed like the perfect solution. Unfortunately, no out-of-the-box option matched DELTA Fiber’s requirements, allowing the customer and DELTA Fiber’s ServiceNow platforms to connect and enable ticket sharing.

While DELTA Fiber looked for a solution, the company’s vendors had to rely on a website portal to raise tickets, which was becoming cumbersome due to the manual effort and human error involved. It was clear that an API—a mechanism that enables two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols—linked to ServiceNow would be necessary to speed up the process. But connecting systems that way needed to be incredibly precise otherwise, it simply wouldn’t work.

“We built an API and had a team of writers make a manual containing all the information that would normally be part of an open API,” says Laurens Putter, Product Owner of ServiceNow at DELTA Fiber. “It was a Word file with copy-paste mistakes and version control issues. Trying to make a technical connection description in Word is silly, but that was our only option at the time.”

Finding the right support

ServiceNow and other vendors were finding it almost impossible to come up with a simple process of creating and updating API in a manageable way that did not involve investing time and effort every time the API needed changes in the future. The only option offered by a vendor was a tool separate from ServiceNow that came with additional costs and support requirements. This was not acceptable to the business, especially since Putter was convinced that a simpler answer was possible.

A modern and reliable open API definition generator was needed to simplify the process of connecting two systems, so DELTA Fiber issued a request for proposal. Almost immediately, it was obvious that Fujitsu would beat the competition due to its in-depth knowledge of ServiceNow and the ability to deliver the right expert for the right challenge. “Fujitsu came in like heroes,” says Putter. “They immediately understood what we needed and suggested a solution inside ServiceNow, which is something that seemed impossible before. Not only that, but they even built a demo early on just to make sure that their idea was exactly what we needed.”

Fujitsu took the technical descriptions and configuration in ServiceNow and managed— without using any additional tools or external environment—to build a manageable internal solution in ServiceNow. In essence, it managed to extend out-of-the-box ServiceNow capabilities to finally match DELTA Fiber’s needs. The company now has a generator that builds specifications in accordance with the open API standard and creates the API definition file automatically and in real time.

Today, whenever something changes in the API, such as an additional field, a rule, or a configuration, the solution adopts these changes and generates a file that is immediately usable for DELTA Fiber partners and Wholesale customers. It’s precise and automatic—exactly what was needed. “The wholesale partners were happy because they’d been struggling with the problem since the API was built,” comments Putter. “But also, the business leaders were satisfied because this was what they’d expected from the get-go, despite this solution not being an out-of-the-box option within ServiceNow.”

The importance of truly understanding customer needs

In just under a month, Fujitsu found a solution to a problem deemed unsolvable by others, extending the reach and capabilities of ServiceNow for DELTA Fiber. With the new feature, the team could generate specifications with a few clicks of a button and pass the time savings on to partners and customers. With thousands of tickets each week, the time saved has been significant. Each ticket gets logged faster and without errors, which means that it can be solved sooner, affecting service for end customers.

Fujitsu is now the benchmark against which Putter measures other providers. “The communication during the project phase was transparent, open, and clear,” he says. “Fujitsu came up with the solution on time, it was all very well documented, and very well tested. Fujitsu team not only kept their promise but over-delivered. But what’s been most important to me is the feeling that they knew what we needed and that they cared. That is, for me, the best quality of Fujitsu. That we were understood. We were seen.”

DELTA Fiber can now focus on growing the business and using its open API definition generator with new acquisitions or partners. Especially since the solution is reusable for all the company’s future APIs. It is also easily managed by Putter and his team. They are fully self-sufficient and comfortable with the ease of use and capabilities of the generator. However, Putter is excited to collaborate again and is confident that if he ever needs help, Fujitsu will be there, listening and overdelivering as usual.